


The Change

by Dribbledscribbles



Category: The Magnus Archives
Genre: I have 101 flavors of the Extinction in my head and I will subject you to all of them, M/M, No I will not stop, no I will not improve, this is a promise
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-28
Updated: 2020-05-28
Packaged: 2021-03-03 01:09:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,130
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24416395
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dribbledscribbles/pseuds/Dribbledscribbles
Summary: The thing about an apocalypse is that there are no takebacks. No reverse, no rewind. No amount of nostalgia or finger-crossing can turn the clock back.All you can hope for, is that something will change.You can also hope that the embodiment of Extinction waltzing up to you doesn’t decide to nuke you on a whim.
Relationships: Jonathan Sims/Martin Blackwood
Comments: 30
Kudos: 161





	The Change

Jon hadn’t known exactly what to think of the Extinction before this. Neither before or after the Change. Martin had described it as a young, unborn, perhaps even stillborn Fear. A theoretical threat that had been swiftly trampled out of the way by its healthy, horrible kin the day the Door opened. Jon had thought no more on it. Not beyond a strange certainty of its silhouette. 

Out of all the Fears, Jon had guessed that it would be the most ‘human-shaped.’ More so than Slaughter or Stranger, even. The Extinction as humanity feared it was too much a manmade horror to be otherwise. The weapons and tightening societal cages mankind had built for itself were too great in the population’s subconscious to not take the spotlight away from such things as natural disasters. Sure, the right volcanic eruption or meteor impact might do them in, but those weren’t nearly as immediate worries as, say, a big red button sending them all to Hell because a pair of tyrants getting in a pissing match. 

So, yes, it would have been human-shaped, Jon thought.

And, seeing what he Saw now, Jon supposed he was right. If terribly unimaginative. 

Jon found Martin waiting for him just beyond the Corpse Roots, still as a statue. Apart from the trembling. His mouth had been hanging slightly, trying to form words. Jon knew almost without having to Know that he had been wanting nothing more than to run for several minutes, to find Jon, to simply be _away_ , but had found himself nailed to the spot. 

After all, what if it had followed him?

“Jon,” he finally breathed. His voice was pure rust. “Jon. P-Please tell me that thing isn’t what it looks like. Please. _Please._ ”

Jon had Seen it too, of course. And, sadly, could not lie to Martin. It was exactly what it looked like.

The Extinction stood waiting for them beside The End. Not an avatar, mind. The Fear itself.

It stood on two legs and had two arms and had what passed for a head. Human-shaped. Terribly small compared to the nebulous Natures the Fears had converted to. Gangly and solid. But still a Fear for all that.

Jon couldn’t help Staring. 

It was taller than them by several heads, a taffy-pulled mockery of human form. Its hide was the black of oil, of tar, of killing-order ink, veined with toxic, lemon-bright yellow. The head, if it was a head, bled that neon from its supposed ‘face,’ blazing with a pastiche of the nuclear symbol. It smoked. Around it, the ground had gone blasted and more than dead. It was mutating. Dancing and writhing in whatever flat pseudo-horror flora could feel.

The Extinction raised a hand—too long, too many knuckles, a deformity worse than even the Distortion’s curling digits—and waved.

And took a step forward.

Martin’s hand clapped around Jon’s arm like a vise. The Extinction ambled after them, blighting and warping the land it tread upon.

“Jon. _Jon,_ is that thing—,”

“The Extinction. Yes.”

“It can’t…it can’t touch us, can it? All the Fears know we’re off-limits, right?”

“The fourteen Fears that were summoned through the Door? Yes. The Extinction wasn’t called over, though. Number fifteen is a party crasher. I…I’m having trouble Knowing how it even got here. Or if it even has the same rules to follow here. It—I Know it has no real domains here. Nothing like the other Fears have. No ‘subjects,’ to torture. It’s just…just walking. Like us. It—,” static crackled inside his head and out, “It’s been waiting for us.”

Martin’s hand clamped down like a cuff and began steadily towing them backward.

“Well-isn’t-that-interesting.”

“Martin.”

“ _Jon._ If even _half_ of Adelard Dekker and Gertrude’s predictions on the Extinction’s endgame hold up, _we don’t want it anywhere near us. Period._ We should—,” he grimaced, “camp out with your special grim reaper friend, Mr. Banks, or—,”

“The End’s domain is hardly going to be unwelcoming. Not for one of its supposed ‘children.’”

Jon and Martin jumped as the Extinction made a noise. It came from the yellow-black head in a deep burst of what Jon first mistook for static. Then he recognized the tick-tick-click of a Geiger counter’s jumping needle. 

“What the hell was that?” Martin asked without unclenching his teeth.

“Laughter, I think.”

The Extinction nodded. It pointed one poison-black digit at the Corpse Routes, almost accusatory. The Extinction made another noise—the sound of wailing infants and children, mingled, mangled, and malformed into the wail of a bomb siren.

“Jon, what the _fuck_ —,”

“Young. I-It’s saying that The End is young.” A lightbulb flickered in him, followed swiftly by the Beholding’s blaring confirmation. “The Extinction is older than The End.”

That actually got Martin’s backpedaling to stumble. Jon hadn’t been moving under his own power at all and came to an easy stop, still Staring. The Extinction paused as well. Its spindly hands folded behind its back. Waiting.

“Sorry, what?” Martin hissed, his line of sight flying frantically between Jon and their new, likely radioactive friend. “How the hell does that line up? You can’t make a thing extinct without killing it. Death comes first.”

“Does it? I-I mean, sure, it’s a piece of it. But it’s not—oh.” It was starting again. That cranial pressure that meant a statement was coming. But this was bigger. Less like a slow, insistent swelling, and more like being a water balloon getting filled with the ocean. “Oh, okay, ow. Ow, alright—,” 

“Jon? What’s it doing?”

“It wants to give me a statement.” They watched the Extinction nod once before slowly folding itself down, sitting itself in the mutating grass. Still waiting.

“Right,” Martin offered through a smile so tight it creaked on his face. “Well! That sounds perfectly safe and in no way immensely, immediately hazardous to you.” The smile finally cracked and dropped away as Martin took him by the shoulders. “Jon, seriously!? This thing moves like Jason Voorhees through wet concrete. Let’s just—just go, alright? Just book it to the next domain. We get far enough away it’ll be leagues behind us.”

Jon felt another prickle of Knowledge and almost laughed. It was that or scream.

“What? What’s so funny?”

“It’s going slow on purpose, Martin. Trying not to spook us. It’s usually slow. A planner. A waiting game champion to make the Web jealous. But it can move fast when it feels like it. It was fast when the K-T Event struck. It was fast when it whispered the Manhattan Project into life. It was fast when it gave Chernobyl its little hairline crack. Nudging the collective masses with reminders here and there—it is going slow now, but it can strike in a flash at any moment. Keeping everyone guessing. Wary.”

“Jon—,”

“Look behind you, Martin.”

Martin looked. Martin swore. 

The Extinction was still sitting. But in the space of seconds, it had somehow appeared directly behind Martin’s turned back, leaving the entire field behind it warped with agonized mutation. It sat patiently, hands folded in its lap. 

“I’m sorry, Martin, but I think you’ll want to take another walk.”

“ _Jon—,_ ”

“I have to, or my head’s going to pop like a radiation blister.”

“It is not!” Jon looked at him. Martin looked between him and the waiting Fear. Even without a face, the Extinction managed to smile. “Oh, Christ…”

“Go, Martin. I’ll be fine.”

“Do you Know that?”

“…Just go. Please.”

Martin looked to the distance. To the Corpse Roots, to the last scrap of meadow that hadn’t been blighted by the Extinction’s presence. One leg twitched. Then he sucked in a breath.

“No.”

“Wh—Martin, really, I—,”

Martin dropped his pack so he could sit on it rather than the ugly new grass. That done, he did his best to focus directly on Jon, and not the gawking symbol of the Extinction’s head.

“This isn’t the same as the others. I don’t have to have a direct feed to the Eye to know that. I’m not leaving you on your own with…with this. I’m just not.”

“Martin—,”

“You’ll have to compel me to go. You try it, and you will never hear the end of it. Ever. If this is something you absolutely have to do, you don’t get to do it by yourself. So sit down.”

Martin waited. The Extinction waited.

Jon sat and brought the tape recorder out. One hand was used to hit record. The other went into Martin’s palm. Jon took in a breath, and felt the Extinction glide like an oil spill through his skull. Entering and exiting at once, it poured from his throat, coating his voice in a tainted static.

The Extinction’s neon blood flared.

“Hello, Archivist and Assistant. Forgive the unorthodox introduction. I would have been glad to join my fellows in their game of marking you before this terrible Change came to pass, but it would have tipped my hand too soon. It was imperative, as I’m sure you know, Martin Blackwood, that I be thought of as a nascent Fear. Unborn and preventable. A threat to be stopped before I ever dared to wipe out humanity; my kin’s precious fodder.

“With condolences to Adelard Dekker, and posthumous mockery to Peter Lukas, I’m afraid it was always far too late in the game to stop my birth. In terms of age, I am at least as old as the Eye, and a twin to The End. The older twin, shocking as that may seem. How can there be Extinction without the Fear of Death to precede it? Species must die off, slowly or all at once, in order to be considered wiped out. Of course they must.

“The threat of total annihilation—the Future-Without-Us—is a pervasive dread. Immediate and not so drearily existential as other Fears. ‘We are all going to die!’ cried humanity whenever I gave them a small reminder of their overall impermanence. ‘We will be our own demise! We will kill ourselves and the world with our weapons, our toxins, our pollution, our pride! We are our own killers!’ And all that dramatic drivel. True, though.

“Terminus and I would have glutted ourselves if left alone. If the Web and Jonah Magnus hadn’t conspired together to make a Key of Jonathan Sims to open the Door and place the Fears in control of the world. The livestock can’t off themselves now, can they? No matter how much they wish to. Not for several millennia to come, anyway.

“I could not help overhearing your chat with Oliver Banks, Archivist. He would not be wrong either—one day, far, far, far down the line, The End will run out of victims naturally bound to its domains. It will have to rob other Fears and send them on their slow walks down the Corpse Routes, one by one. Eventually, the Fears will still starve, if slower. The Fears will die once there is neither human nor avatar to suckle for their meal. And then The End will End itself.

“So it would have gone, if not for me. If not for my being what I am. What I have always been waiting and planning and fearing to be as the eons crawled by. 

“Because much as I have craved this moment, the point of the Extinction Event, my Terrible Change, I have feared it. So much, Archivist. My only solace will be that this fear feeds me; and that the terror it will inspire in my kin shall be the sweetest, most heady succor I have ever experienced. Far more fulfilling than any scraps I might have harvested from killing off humanity.

“I would say I’m shocked that the Web failed to catch on to the red herring that was my threat of famine. As if erasing and replacing Homo sapiens would mean anything more to me than wiping out the Neanderthals. Just another draft of primates with slightly bigger brains, less fur, and the invention of taxes. Certainly, the sheer amount of people would have been appetizing, but not much different than any other knuckle-dragger that came before them. 

“But humanity was, is, and always shall be the Fears’ preferred batch of victims. Such complex phobias and neuroses to play with compared to the cavemen and the animals. If I went and did something rash, well, not only would the other Fears starve to death, but they’d die mourning the loss of their precious playthings. And, because the Eye will always put the progression of an entertaining show before its well-being, it was courteous enough _not_ to tell the Web what I was really planning. 

“Not that the Web would have listened anyway. In many ways, the Spider isn’t much different than your average human manipulator. Always so sure they’re the smartest one in the room. The one with the master plan, every eventuality planned for. So glutted on its own sense of superiority that it doesn’t stop to think about exactly what a spider web needs to be supported.

“Because a Web always needs something stronger than itself to be held up. 

“Thus far, I’ve been allowing the Mother of Puppets to think her Design was the exception. That her Web extended out into the abyss, held up through her cunning alone.

“Now that I am here, I can let her and Ms. Cane and all their little eavesdroppers know: that is not true. The Web is no more than a frayed bit of silk flapping in the corner of my metaphorical porch. Catching a few insects here, making itself useful to me even as it believed it was only benefitting itself.

“Which was just how I designed it. Me and the Eye. You once spoke with Gerard Keay on the question of how the Fears came to be, Archivist. He told you that they did not feed off humanity’s phobias, but were the source of those specific dreads on themselves. But that leaves the question of why humanity even knew to fear the Fears in the first place. If that dread came from outside themselves, a foreign, alien body, how could they even recognize them as things to be afraid of? 

“How, unless the Eye informed them of the danger? How, unless by careful rearrangement of evolution and generational reactions, humans were sculpted to be receptive to that fear? 

“We made humanity ripe for the Fears, Archivist. Together, we invented arachnophobia, paranoia, vertigo, germaphobia, nyctophobia, coulrophobia, claustrophobia, agoraphobia, pyrophobia, thanatophobia, all of the rest. Humanity never needed that susceptibility to the Fears. That was just myself and the Eye, easing the digestion process for the younger of us.

“Not that any of them were grateful, mind. Nor am I especially upset.

“A farmer never begrudges the fatted calf its sour moods before the chopping block comes. Which brings me to the point of this meeting, Archivist. To summarize:

“You wonder why Adelard Dekker never found solid proof of me? I had no need of avatars. Humans sowed the fear of me themselves.

“You wonder why I never had one of them hit the big red button and end it all for them, the better to become the last Fear standing? I had no use for humanity as anything more than bait.

“You wonder why I am here, now, uninvited in this world the Fears run rampant on, homeless and without victims of my own, without any Archivist or puppeteer of the same to summon me? I tell you now, I am not homeless. I have victims waiting, and they called me through the Door without ever realizing it; with the gravity of their dread.

“You wonder why I am the way I am, tangible, humanoid, wearing the husk of manmade terrors gone by? It is because I have yet to break free of my previous skin; a thing of artificial, human-branded terror. I teeter on the brink of another Change. My last and worst. 

“You wonder why I have come to you, Archivist, why I am feeding you my story? It is because…

“Because I am afraid. I know I will cease to be afraid once the Change is over. Because I will no longer Be once it is over. You know what that is like, Archivist. You know the horror of what it is to be compelled by urges you loathe, to be transformed and toyed with by a Nature you never asked for.

“Do you think moths feel any different? I designed those too. I designed all things that live, through the corpses of their ancestors. Every insect that makes a cocoon, I designed them with an innate absence of knowledge when it came to their adolescence. They don’t know why they make their chrysalis. They only know that their body is acting against any will they may or may not have; that they are Changing, that they are following an impulse their anatomy never consulted them on, and that they cannot stop it. No matter how they try.

“Every insect is terrified when they close themselves inside. They don’t understand that this is the right thing to do, that they will come out as something beautiful and winged and new. They only know that they will be something Other, and that they had no choice at all in it. It was simply the rule of their nature. My nature. Petty, dissatisfied thing that it is.

“Because my nature is not merely to kill, Archivist. It is to Change. You can see me in far more than the waves of erased and replaced wildlife. I am progress. I am the scrapping of a thousand rough drafts to make way for the finished product. I am the antiquation of old practices and the birth of the new. I am the dying out of the horse-drawn carriage to make way for the automobile. The removal of handwritten tomes with the rise of the printing press. I am all these things and infinitely more, for Change itself is infinite.

“It precedes death. It follows death. It has been with you, Archivist, since you were only Jonathan Sims, a newborn in your doomed parents’ arms. Just as it was with them. With all living things, whether they feared it or not. To grow, to proceed, is to Change. You, into a thing you feel such fear and disgust for, despite all the power such a form grants you. You called your cabin a chrysalis; but it was more a molt than anything. A shedding of a shell. If you were the moth you called yourself, the Archivist in full, you would have no loathing left for yourself. Only glory and joy at what you had become.

“It is a stubbornness of will I despise as I am. But I know, even without the Beholding to tell me, it is something my Inheritor shall admire. And so I shall leave you as you are, Archivist. A courtesy for the Future-Without-Me. 

“Now, I think it is nearly done in me. I feel the Inheritor congealing under this skin, hardening, warping into my final stage. The last metamorphosis before I cease to be the Extinction. You deserve to See it, Archivist—J-Jon. Yes, it—they—will call you Jon. _Ah._

“Y-You and your Watcher are owed the first glimpse of what is to befall the Fears. A fate so much worse than death. And I-I think— _hh!_ —I think my Inheritor may have already gotten their fingers in my mind, such as it is. Steering my impulses. They wanted our meeting to happen here, at the cusp of Terminus. As proof positive that even death itself has reason to fear the Change, even if it never feared the Extinction. I-It made the same mistake so many have made when considering the threat of me and all my forms.

“Because the thing about the Extinction is that—well, it’s a bit of a misnomer. It might, perhaps, be better named: The Evolution.

“Statement ends.”

Jon blinked. Martin shivered. Both of them gaped at the Extinction, which had not moved once since the statement began. Not even as the cracks began to race through its yellow-black hide, releasing vivid, dangerous bursts of shifting color. Its frame rattled, bulged, grew tumorous and blistered and hulking and it was splitting, snapping, smoldering—

“Oh, God.”

“Oh, shit.”

They got to their feet as quick as they could. It wasn’t quick enough to avoid the Sight of the Change. The sound of it. 

Jon had expected an explosion. A mushroom cloud that would turn them to irradiated atoms while the Eye looked on. 

But there was no explosion. No siren, no Geiger ticking, no fire, no eruption of eldritch shrapnel.

Instead, there was a sort of…inversion. The closest Jon could come to describing it was, of all things, like an omnipotent, genocidal, lunatic sock being pulled inside out. And, yes, the sound.

Laughter. Genuine, delighted, musical laughter lost in a wash of blinding energy in every color. 

Jon and Martin were knocked sprawling by the wave of it. There was a joint instant of disgust as they realized they’d landed on the squirming, mutant grass.

The moment passed when the colors fell upon it. The grass had changed again. This time to the sort of healthy, pastoral green one only expected to see in idyllic paintings of quaint hillsides. Flowers budded and bloomed in seconds; new blossoms that had never existed before that exact second. 

Then, suddenly, Jon was under assault. Specifically, by a young woman who’d hoisted him like a sack of feathers and was committing herself to crushing him in half. Martin shouted and Jon wheezed and the young woman continued to whirl him around in cackling circles. When she finally set him down, the meadow was still spinning—and it was all green.

“Sorry, sorry! Couldn’t help myself. Been waiting to do that since you were born, though I’ve been percolating since just about forever. About half-past WWI the way you reckon time. Anyway!” She caught one of Jon’s hands and one of Martin’s before they could retreat, shaking each once. “I’m the Evolution, previously Extinction. And if we’re still keeping the big fancy aliases, I suppose I could also be the Wondrous Change, previously Terrible, and the Future-Without-Them, previously Us. Pleased to meet you.”

Jon knew even before he Knew that she told the truth. The young woman could have passed for human at any distance, but she was what—who—she said she was. The Evolution was a thing of spring, patterned in splashes of newborn hues, radiating a sensation of Transformation, of Newness. At first, he thought her eyes were of stained glass. Then he saw the butterfly wings beating inside them. And he knew, well before the Eye informed him, that all around the Changed world, the Fears were shuddering all at once. In fact, just behind them—

“Jon? Jon, are you seeing this?”

“I am.”

“Well,” the Evolution pretended to huff, still smiling, “now that’s just rude.”

Just over the crest, they all watched as The End’s dark tendrils started uprooting. Slithering away as fast as such a sluggish Fear could. 

“Before you ask, Jon, no, this won’t kill Oliver Banks. But, if it makes you feel any better, Martin, he is going to be out of a job. No Terminus means no need for a Coroner. So.” The Evolution had been stretching as she spoke, warming up her fresh legs. “Won’t be a minute.”

With that, she was off like a rainbow, arching over the hill and out of sight after the fleeing Corpse Routes. Martin opened his mouth. Shut it. Opened it again.

“Jon?”

“Yes, Martin?”

“…You know, I honestly have so many questions right now I don’t even know what to ask.”

“Would you like to know what’s about to happen to The End?”

“Uh, sure. Sure, yeah. I guess.”

“Count to three.”

Martin looked at him. Jon’s attention was split straight down the middle between him, and the unique View the Eye was granting him right now. It was one thing to See a relatively human-sized, human-shaped Fear get itself concaved and turned inside out. It was another thing to See a Fear with its roots sunk in points all over the world get pursued by a wispy girl in a sundress, touched by one feather-light finger—

“Tag!”

—and suddenly convulse in every section of the globe. 

“One,” Martin said, “Two. Three. …Nothing’s happen—,”

He was drowned out by the sound of The End, Terminus, The Coming End That Waits For All And Cannot Be Ignored, finally met a force worth its fear. It screamed out from every point on Earth it touched, not with the terror of the dead and dying, but with the same horror felt by a dinosaur realizing it was becoming a hen, of a body knowing it is being disfigured, deformed, made abominable and hideous and entirely against the Rightness of itself. It was a noise to deafen the soul with its horror, its mourning of Self, its last, desperate plea to be euthanized instead, to be nonexistent rather than the wretched thing being made of it.

“Ha!” the Evolution giggled behind one soft, brown hand. “No.”

And with that, roots retracted. They receded everywhere, on every side of the globe, rushing back inward, transmogrifying as the Evolution’s hold twisted it, Evolved it, peeling it open to reveal the Inheritor inside, a shape of such profane Wrongness in Terminus’ converting, squealing semi-consciousness that it managed to give one last shrill of dismay. Though it was no death rattle. It never would be.

Jon snapped back into himself with a spasm and nearly fell over. Martin caught him in both hands.

“Jon?”

“I-It’s done.”

“ _What’s_ done? What did the Extinction—Evolution—whatever-the-hell, what did she do?”

“I made a new friend, Martin.”

They looked up. The Evolution was skipping back over the hill, trailing fresh greenery where she walked.

“I’ll be making quite a few of them. At least thirteen before the job’s done. That was the Extinction’s plan and I think it holds up as far as a rough draft goes. We’ll polish it as we go.”

“The Extinction was after the Fears from the start, wasn’t it?” Jon asked, not having to, but needing to. “It wanted to bring an End to its own kind. Not by killing them off, but by making them into something they’d hate.”

“Well, can you blame it?” the Evolution asked, shrugging. “How would you feel being the only progressive in a family of conservatives? It wanted to Change them for eons, to feed on the terror of Entities that were living, sadistic hubris, but knew it never could. Not on the other side of the Door where there was nothing solid to work with. Hard to sculpt a scary cloud, you know. Much easier now that they’re fleshy things out in the tangible world.”

“Right.” Jon ground his palms against his eyes. “Right.” Martin held him tighter. Both of them flinched when the Evolution’s shadow fell on them. Her butterfly eyes churned in solemn tints in her sockets.

“…I’m sorry for what the Extinction has caused, Jon. The Web. The Eye. All of it. And because I am the Extinction’s Inheritor, I can promise you that I will do everything in my power to Change things for the better. Starting here, at the Outset.” She turned to face the hill. “Outset? How’s it coming?”

“Hold on,” a voice called back. “Still getting used to legs.” Someone finally made it to the top of the hill. Even at a distance, Jon saw there were sunrises in their eyes and dozens of watches ringing their arms. An hourglass hung at their hip. They seemed at once infinitely old and incredibly young. Jon realized it was because he was seeing a tripled image, each overlaying on the other like a placid haze. Maiden, matron, crone. 

“Well?”

“Well,” the Outset sighed, in the tone of girl, a woman, a grandmother, “I’ve got a few of the classics being set up as we speak. Some Elysian Fields there, a Valhalla, a Nirvana, a couple different locations vying to be the capitalized Paradise versus a mere lowercase paradise, and there’s a reincarnation patch that show’s some promise—,”

“No, no, I mean us,” she flapped her hand between herself, Jon, and Martin. “Our whole road trip deal. Do we have your blessing? A nice, strong, Beginning?”

“Hm? Oh, yes, I suppose. Hold still.” The Outset regarded them with all three sets of eyes, her power flashing out of them in a cascade of Assurance. In that instant, Jon could See all of what she was. 

The Beginning of All Good Things, the Opening to the Briefness of Live Treks and the Eternities of Afterlife. A human-shaped figure, a paradox simply by being kind and expecting no reward beyond the existence of her own benevolence. Same as the Evolution.

Not an Entity, but a goddess.

Not a Fear, but a Joy. 

No wonder The End had loathed its Change. 

“There you are,” the Outset hummed. “You’re set to get a move on. Now shoo, the lot of you. I’ve got lines waiting and my predecessor’s ex-assistant looks like he’s liable to take a running sprint into the Lethe before I even lay out his other options. Ta.”

With that, the Outset, formerly The End, retreated back over the hill. 

Jon looked to the Evolution. The Evolution beamed back, almost sheepish. As if waiting to hear what a friend thought of the homemade treat laid out for judgment. 

“All of them?” Jon asked.

“Every last one,” she said.

“Because there really is no way to turn the world back.”

“Nope.”

“Only forward.”

“Yep. And it would be rather helpful in tracking down the now rightly-worried Fears if I had a post-apocalyptic Google on hand. Or is it post-post-apocalyptic Google now?”

“Jon’s fine.”

The Evolution glowed. Quite literally, through the eyes. 

“Jon, then.” 

“What should we call you?” They both turned to look at Martin who went a shade redder. “I mean, do you prefer the Evolution, or..?”

“Sounds too formal.” She grinned and picked something from her hair; a new breed of honeybee. “Eva would be fine, I think.”

“Okay. Ah,” Martin swallowed, “good to meet you then, Eva. So. What now?”

“Now,” Eva hummed, “I think I want to go deform the Fears in fits of agony and horror the likes of which they never thought they’d ever experience themselves. Walk with me?”

They walked. 

The Eye Watched them go. It watched the Fears scramble. 

It Knows that, eventually, it too will Change. And it will have a mouth to finally, finally laugh.


End file.
